Polar biodiversity data: from a national marine platform to a global data portal

Global access to accurate biodiversity data is a prerequisite to our progress in understanding biodiversity dynamics in ecosystems and any changes that are occurring. Despite recent major advancements in sharing data on the world’s species, one of the remaining challenges relates to the mechanics of guiding data systematically from its provenance to end users. It can take considerable effort to orchestrate a successful sampling campaign, manage samples obtained in often extreme, remote conditions and to secure preservation of, and access to, the acquired data. Here, we briefly describe biodiversity data flow from a polar ship to a national data repository and onward to a global data portal. This paper highlights a few crucial points in this process, which aims to provide information systematically into the mosaic of our polar species biodiversity knowledge. This flexible workflow can be modified for other data types and adopted by other data repositories.